DISLOCATION AND GLOBALIZATION ON THE UNITED
STATES-MEXICO BORDER: THE CASE OF GARMENT
WORKERS IN EL PASO, TEXAS
FRANCISCA JAMES HERNÁNDEZ1
University of California at Berkeley
INTRODUCTION
On a sunny Labor Day of 1997 in El Paso, Texas, some three hundred
women and their supporters demanded jobs and denounced the North
America Free Trade Agreement: “NAFTA NO! ¡TRABAJOS SI!
NAFTA NO! ¡TRABAJOS SI!” Many were recently laid off from the
city’s garment factories. Others were about to lose their jobs. Drum
beats, fists, and gritos punctuated the cool, morning air as we marched
through the city’s streets and chanted, “¡TRABAJOS SI! NAFTA
NO!¡TRABAJOS SI! NAFTA NO!”
Within four years of the implementation of NAFTA, El Paso had lost
the most jobs—nearly seven thousand—of any city in the United States
due to the trade treaty (Medaille and Wheat 1997). These job losses
represented nearly half (47.5 percent) of all jobs lost in Texas as a
result of NAFTA at the time (Public Citizen 1997). Enough to
devastate any city, the flood of layoffs occurred in a metropolitan area
with nearly one-third in poverty (30.2 percent), the fourth most
impoverished in the country (U.S. Census Bureau 1998), a per capita
income about two-thirds (63.1 percent) the national figure (City of El
Paso 2000), and an unemployment rate consistently two to three times
the U.S. average during the 1990s.2 El Paso’s material scarcity
1
Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities, Department of Ethnic Studies, University
of California at Berkeley,
Berkeley, California, U.S.A.
2
U.S. unemployment was ranged four to five percent during most of the 1990s while El
Paso’s unemployment rate averaged 12.1 percent in that decade (UTEP 2002, received via
email, October 7, 2002. Average calculated by author from yearly data).
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FRANCISCA JAMES
correlated with an ethnoracial make-up in which three-fourths (76.6
percent) were “Hispanic or Latino” (City of El Paso 2003).3
Most of the newly unemployed were Mexicanas and Chicanas.4
According to La Mujer Obrera, a workers’ advocacy association which
organized the demonstration, seventy percent of dislocated workers
were Spanish-speaking between thirty-five and sixty years of age, and
sixty-five percent had less than a sixth grade education and limited
English literacy (Montoya 2000). Many had migrated to the United
States as children or young adults. Entering a life of labor in both
factories and families, few had gained additional formal schooling or
training after migration. Up until the loss of their jobs, many were the
financial heads of their households, “sustaining up to four generations
of their families— themselves, their parents, their children and in some
cases, their grandchildren” (Arnold 1997). Their wages were often
below poverty level, particularly among these heads of household. In
El Paso, about half of female-headed families (51.2 percent) were in
poverty (U.S. Census Bureau 2000).
That Labor Day morning, I walked with the dislocated workers, their
friends and families along the streets of downtown El Paso. Across the
emaciated Rio Grande River lay Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua. Before us,
the urbanscapes of the two cities blended into one transborder
metropolis of two million people. Along the route, I met Carmen and
Abelina, both dislocated workers.5 I asked them why they were at the
protest. Yelling above the chants and pounding drums, Carmen
explained: “We are supporting the workers because they, as much as
we, were all working in the same jobs and they displaced us in order to
take the jobs to Mexico. And they have promised us training, [but] they
haven’t given it to us.” Carmen was laid off the previous December
from Adrian Manufacturing along with two hundred other workers.
There, she said, “We made clothes under contract with JCPenney [and]
different stores. They closed it, and they took it to Mexico. …It’s the
second [factory] where I’ve worked that they close”.
3
Nearly two-thirds (63.8 percent) of the population were Mexican or of Mexican origin
(City of El Paso 2003).
4
Throughout this essay, I use the terms Chicana and Mexicana interchangeably.
5
Carmen and Abelina are pseudonyms. I use real names for public figures including labor
leaders. Translations are mine.
Dislocation and globalization on the United States–Mexico border…
193
Abelina was laid off the previous December. She was at the march, she
said, “in order to support the people that don’t have…WE don’t have
work, now.” Abelina labored seven years in a warehouse at Johnson &
Johnson where she loaded and unloaded products that went to one of
its three companies in Ciudad Juárez. “They suddenly closed the
factory and went to Juárez,” she said. “They laid off some-- we were
like five hundred people. …I was with them for awhile, and I liked my
job, but they took it away. Now, we’re without a job. … And like me
there are many, and there will be more, many more.”
As Abelina predicted, the number of displaced workers in El Paso grew
to 20,000 just three years later (Montoya 2000). La Mujer Obrera
described the city’s “NAFTA-era economy” this way: “The dominoeffect if this restructuring has meant the disappearance of $154 million
per year in lost [personal] income. The cataclysmic descent into
poverty has strained the resources of social service providers,
destroying the client base of small businesses and devastating entire
neighborhoods” (Montoya 2000).
María Flores, a leader of La Mujer Obrera, related the personal
devastation wrought by massive job losses: “Before 1994, there was
already a lot of unemployment. NAFTA was still not implemented, yet
the unemployment was disastrous. When NAFTA passed, conditions
got even worse for our community. During the first month of NAFTA,
from January to February of 1994, twenty sewing factories left, leaving
four thousand, five thousand workers immediately without
employment. In addition to all the unemployment that already existed,
this was a very serious situation. This was a disaster for the families
because nobody expected that they would lose their job from one day
to the next after working five, fifteen, thirty, forty years at a company.
Some only got one day of notice, which caused many problems even
death among some workers due to the depression, the desperation it
caused, particularly for the older workers. The situation in the working
community of our people, of single mothers, is very critical” (M.
Flores 1998).
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FRANCISCA JAMES
1. CHICANA FEMINISM, LABOR (ON THE BORDER), AND
RESEARCH METHODS
The profound impact of trade liberalization and NAFTA on the border
gave, and continues to give, political and ethical urgency as well as a
unique historical opportunity to examine the experiences of a subaltern
group within the First World –Chicana/ Mexicana workers–
undergoing globalization and consider their possible futures beyond
dislocation. The purpose of my presentation today is to bear witness to
the dislocation of workers, analyze it within a framework of neoliberal
structural adjustments inclusive of the First World and, finally, to make
known their efforts to resist dislocation and develop alternatives to its
devastatingly exclusionary effects.
In my analysis, I strive to understand and represent dislocation, forms
of resistance, and alternatives to the ravages of neoliberal social
restructuring through intersections of race/ethnicity, class, and gender.
I am inspired by feminist approaches in which these and other social
categories are considered simultaneously. Intersectionality along the
axes of race/ethnicity, class, and gender has been an epistemological
tradition of Chicana feminist scholarship since its inception. In
anthropology, intersectionality is evident in the ovumial works of
Margarita Melville (1980) and Patricia Zavella (1984), among others.6
As Zavella argues, “A feminist analysis…should focus on the totality
of women’s experience” (in W. Flores, 1997: 246). This totality stands
in contrast with the universalized subjectivity of white, middle-class
womanhood projected through much of Euro-American liberal
feminism, particularly during the emergence and early development of
Chicana feminist scholarship. My work contributes to a Chicana
feminist intersectional tradition allowing for a more nuanced
understanding of marginality and democratic alterities as we examine
border communities undergoing globalization and struggling to forge a
more humane and just future.
My work also contributes to a small but significant body of qualitative
literature about Mexicana/Chicana garment workers and labor activism
in El Paso (Coyle, et al. 1980; Honig 1996; Márquez 1995); only a few
were conducted after the passage of NAFTA (Navarro 2002a, 2002b;
6
“Ovumial” occurred to me as a feminist alternative to the masculinist “seminal”.
Dislocation and globalization on the United States–Mexico border…
195
Ortíz-González 2004; Yoon Louie 2004). In my analysis, I combine
these studies and others about Chicana/Mexicana industrial labor, the
apparel industry, and processes of globalization in order to provide a
richly textured account of dislocation, the marginalities and forms of
opposition it engenders, and the emergence of an obrera-centered
alternative. Today, I present some of this analysis along with excerpts
from participant observation, interviews, testimonies, and primary
documents I collected from 1997-2000, the initial years of dislocation,
supplemented with descriptive statistics and information from La
Mujer Obrera’s website.
Research of El Paso’s garment industry in relation to U.S. industrial
labor, generally, and the nation’s apparel-manufacturing sector is
nearly non-existent (Spener 2002). Indeed, studies of Chicana/
Mexicana industrial labor in the U.S. or transnationally are scarce,
conducted mostly by a handful of Chicana feminist scholars (Ruiz
1987; Segura 1986; Zavella 1987, 2000). This valuable work, however,
overlooks the border. Conversely, research on women and industrial
labor at the border is considerable but focuses almost exclusively on
the Mexican side and the export processing industry, more commonly
known as maquiladoras.
Workers’ narratives presented above illustrate some of their
experiences with globalization and its broader impact during the first
years of NAFTA when the apparel industry relocated wholesale
outside the U.S., often to Juárez and other places in Mexico, as Abelina
indicated. I continue, now, by locating the problem of dislocation
historically in the construction of Chicanas/os, including Mexican
immigrants, as a subjugated people colonized internally to the United
States. Subsequently, I explore some of the ethnoracial, class and
gendered dimensions of dislocation as these become mutually
constituted with the emergence of neoliberal capitalist globalization.
This will be followed by a discussion of the barriers to workers’ reemployment and economic stability and subsequent mobilization. I
conclude with a final narrative by María Flores about “El Puente”, a
vision developed by displaced workers to build a bridge to a future of
greater autonomy and inclusion of working class, poor, Mexicanas.
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2. NEOCOLONIAL ORDER AND RISE OF NEOLIBERALISM
ON THE BORDER
In her personal treatise about the border, Chicana feminist Gloria
Anzaldúa wrote, “The U.S.-Mexican border es una herida abierta [is
an open wound] where the Third World grates against the first and
bleeds” (Anzaldúa 1987: 3). Anzaldúa’s poignant observation alludes
to vast social disparities of global proportions at the border. However,
as the narratives by dislocated workers and statistics reflect, not only
the Third World bleeds where Mexico and the U.S. meet. Suffering,
too, occurs throughout the “Third World within” where Mexicanos,
and women especially, are wounded by a globalizing, neoliberal
capitalist regime constructed upon centuries of overlapping
colonialisms and through intersections of race/ethnicity, class, and
gender.
Mexican Americans endured a half-century of mass dispossession from
their lands and subjugation to second-class citizenship after the U.S.
war against Mexico that ended in 1848 (Estrada, et al. 2001).
Following this initial period of deterritorialization, Mexican Americans
and Mexican immigrants have been an indispensable source of cheap
labor in the U.S. southwest (including the border region) throughout
the 20th century to the present (Acuña 2004; Meier and Ribera 1972).
The sectors in which women—Chicanas and Mexicanas—have been
most concentrated are the so-called unskilled and semi-skilled such as
agriculture (Acuña, 2004: 192; Segura, 1986: 49), household and other
cleaning services (Romero 1992), and certain manufacturing sectors
such as apparel (Coyle, et al. 1980), canning and packing (Ruiz 1987;
Zavella 1987), and electronics (Zavella 1991). Chicana feminist and
other scholars, some just cited, have long documented that Chicanas
and Mexican immigrant women have, on the whole, experienced even
more acute forms of labor exploitation and workforce exclusion than
their Chicano male or white ethnic counterparts of either gender.
Sociologist Denise Segura (1986) refers to this intersectional condition
as a “triple oppression”.
Chicanas and Mexicanas worked in manufacturing at least as early as
the 1920s in California’s canneries (Ruiz 1987). In the post-World War
II era, Chicanas and Mexicanas were drawn further into industrial
Dislocation and globalization on the United States–Mexico border…
197
production as some factories moved from the northern U.S. to the
south and southwest in search of cheaper non-unionized labor, fewer
environmental restrictions, lower taxes, and government subsidies.
Historian Jefferson Cowie (1999) argues U.S. de-industrialization was
preceded by these regional “capital moves” before moving across
international borders with the same motives. Other research supports
this thesis for the apparel industry for which the southwest was a
destination in the well-known “rustbelt-to-sunbelt” phenomenon
(Collins 2003; NACLA 1980; Zavella 1991). During this period, these
regional capital migrations contributed to the rise of Chicanas and
Mexicanas employed in manufacturing. In El Paso, for instance, the
garment industry accounted for more than half (50-62 percent) of all
manufacturing employment from 1965-1976 (Márquez, 1996: 72).
Once a preferred and profitable labor force, working-poor Chicanas
and Mexicanas in the U.S. were increasingly vulnerable to the
dislocations of globalization as the manufacturing sectors in which
they had been concentrated historically migrated across the border.
This occurred more dramatically for the textile and apparel industries
in the 1980s under the “the neoliberal agenda” of President Ronald
Reagan which accelerated the passage of trade accords favoring
expansionists within these industries (Rosen 2002: 119). Texas,
however, was one of the last states abandoned by the garment industry
due to working conditions so inferior, sociologist and maquila scholar
Leslie Sklair referred to it as “the Texas maquila” (1993: 104).
In the 1990s, however, NAFTA became the driving force of neoliberal
globalization and broke the industry’s residual stronghold in Texas. It
continued the restructuring of the border economy and dismantled El
Paso’s garment industry, once the city’s most important source of
private employment (DeMoss 1989), manufacturing (Márquez, 1995:
72) and, for many years, one of the largest centers of denim jeans
production in the U.S. (Spener, 2002: 139). In a regional economy of
few economic opportunities, particularly for working class and
immigrant women, the garment industry was a privileged sector of
employment for Chicanas and Mexicanas in El Paso in spite of the
many abuses that characterize this industry historically (Boris 2003;
Collins 2003) and in El Paso, specifically (Coyle, et al. 1980; Márquez,
1995: 70-71).
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María Flores, our labor leader and herself a former garment worker,
bemoaned this loss of good jobs, blaming it on the development of the
maquiladora industry just across the river. “In the 70s,” she said, “there
was a treaty, the twin plant treaty. This was the first treaty that allowed
for a business to both stay here and have a maquila, or a production
factory, in Juárez. Many businesses left El Paso, immediately leaving
thousands of workers without jobs. These were big companies with
good salaries. Jobs in a company like this in the 60s and 70s was
something very, very fabulous because some had health insurance,
good wages, paid vacations. They gave they kind of things a worker
deserves. But once they saw the opportunity, these businesses left” (M.
Flores 1998).
3. MARGINALITY, DISLOCATION AND “THE NAFTA PROGRAMS”
By 1997, NAFTA was so closely linked to a deteriorating economy
along the border, a Texas Senate Committee investigated its impact
through a series of public hearings. This represented a victory for La
Mujer Obrera and others who mobilized to pressure the state to act.
Dislocated workers and leaders of La Mujer Obrera were a center of
attention at the hearing held in El Paso in November 1997, which I
attended. Their testimonies publicly revealed the loss of jobs was only
the beginning of a new phase of marginality for them. Following the
layoffs, they discovered a range of significant barriers to reemployment. For instance, dislocated workers were increasingly
denied entry into even the lowest end of the job market due to new
English-only language requirements. Displaced workers also often
complained of the competition from younger women. These forms of
language and age discrimination compounded the general lack of jobs.
Added to the closing of the local labor market was the failure of what
displaced workers called “the NAFTA Programs”. The NAFTA
Programs were a web of federal, state, and local agencies for providing
educational and job re-training services promised by NAFTA’s side
agreements. However, at the hearing, two dislocated workers and one
of their leaders testified to the poor design of these programs,
conducted only in English, and how unemployment benefits were
poverty-level and often late or not even paid. Their testimonies also
Dislocation and globalization on the United States–Mexico border…
199
indicated how training programs were gender-segregated, relegating
women to minimum-wage, low-end vocations such as childcare and
elderly assistance.
Moreover, the hearing revealed how these crises confronting displaced
workers were rooted in the neocolonized status of the border and
chronic institutionalized neglect. Already underfunded and stressed
given the generalized poverty of the community, local and state
agencies were overwhelmed by the numbers of dislocated workers and
their needs. One local community college administrator indicated the
problem of institutionalized scarcity when he testified, “The current
solutions and responses to this crisis are not sufficient to meet the
challenges. We lack infrastructure. We are serving four thousand
people with an infrastructure that we have for three hundred people.”
Further explaining the failure to provide adequate job-training, he said,
“The NAFTA [job re-training] legislation was drafted for the
Pittsburgh displaced worker or the Detroit displaced worker or the
Dallas displaced worker. It was not drafted for the El Paso displaced
worker, certainly not for the border displaced worker. The NAFTA
[job re-training program] really is looking at someone who already has
basic English skills, basic literacy skills, probably GED [high school
equivalency], probably a high school degree, and already some basic or
higher-skill job skills, NOT the typical displaced worker you find in El
Paso” (Ramírez 1997).
His testimony, along with that of displaced workers, referred implicitly
to a further problem of the cultural model for job re-training and the
presumed subjectivity of the industrial, working- or middle-class
individual who is a monolingual English-speaking, white ethnic, EuroAmerican male, in spite of the historical reality in which white women
and people of color have long been a part of the industrial workforce in
the United States. The exclusion of displaced workers from jobtraining demonstrated how economic legitimacy, that is, the right to be
re-trained and the right to work, is demonstrably ethnoracialized,
classed, and gendered.
Displaced workers’ testimony at the hearing also revealed the
inadequacies were not only technical, that is, due only to a lack of
resources or improper pedagogies, but that systems of governance were
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not readily open to examination or corrective and, thereby, contributed
to the failure of “NAFTA programs” and the marginalization of
displaced workers. Displaced workers laid bare a widespread lack of
democratic practice in public institutions at all levels of government,
exposing an authoritarianism that sheltered hierarchies from criticism
and accountability.
By creating large numbers of unemployed and relegating the problems
of unemployment and re-employment to unprepared, underfunded, and
unresponsive institutions, the crisis of dislocation had the unintended
effect of motivating many workers to renew their collective
mobilization. As on Labor Day of 1997, displaced workers protested
and marched to reclaim their jobs, to demand that promises be kept,
and to stem a deepening marginalization of their community. During
the years I conducted field research, they waged demonstrations at
international bridges, city council meetings, senate hearings, and city
streets demanding recognition as legitimate economic, political, and
cultural subjects.
Workers’ militancy also propelled them on a path toward a new social
imaginary, one distinct from that planned and structured for them by an
ethnoracist, patriarchal, and corporatist state economy. Through their
intellectual labor and activism, the workers indicated how alternatives
to marginality and spaces of relative autonomy and inclusion –what I
call “the democratic imaginary”– are conceived and achieved.
4. EL PUENTE AND THE DEMOCRATIC IMAGINARY
I conclude with a final narrative by María Flores in which
she describes “El Puente”, a bridge quite different from
those at the border serving NAFTA.
“Even though we have brown skin, we are from the
United States. For this reason, we have the same rights as
any citizen. So, as an organization, we are trying to build
a bridge. This is the bridge that we need and that we are
imagining for our people, the workers displaced by
NAFTA. The bridge includes good schools with bilingual
training and stable jobs… Also, investment in economic
Dislocation and globalization on the United States–Mexico border…
201
development for the workers because there are resources
from the NAFTA bank [NADBank] that are for making
loans to workers who want to be business people. …The
organization is doing different things in order to build this
bridge.
We made efforts to get this building. Aside from this
building we have another on the next block that is for a
school for displaced mothers. We are talking about how
to create an incubator for micro-enterprises in which the
workers themselves can be self-sufficient. We are also
trying to create a school to give them education and
training in business because we don’t want them to fail.
We also want to conserve our culture. We’re in the
middle of renovating the place to have a space for our
people to be able to have music from different cities or
countries and other cultural activities so that we don’t
have to go pay twenty-five dollars just to get into a place
to hear mariachis. So, these are the alternatives that we as
an organization are trying to achieve for our people. It’s a
slow, very slow process that we’re in, right? But, little by
little, we think we’re going to succeed” (M. Flores 1998).
That year (1998), La Mujer Obrera received a forty-five million dollar
grant from the federal government enabling them to realize each of the
projects envisioned for El Puente that Flores described.
CONCLUSION
The displaced workers embody a democratic imaginary in which
organization, mobilization, and multiple expressions of selfdetermination by the marginalized are central. Drawing from their
experiences, the democratic imaginary is as a realm of opposition
making inequality and injustice visible. It is where critique and
analysis occur, de-constructing power in order to hold it accountable
through political association, civic participation, and protest. Through
these methods, the dislocated workers materialized a vision of relative
autonomy through the building of institutions, provision of services,
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and creation of economic possibilities as an alternative to a
neoliberalism that would leave them jobless, homeless, hopeless, and
even dead.
Finally, all of these arenas of empowerment are expressed through
cultural idioms in which displaced workers find a “shared sense of
legitimacy”, the basis of a modern social imaginary, according to
philosopher Charles Taylor (2004), and formed through “common
understandings” and “common practices”. For displaced workers, these
include the Spanish language, devotion to La Virgen de Guadalupe,
Mexican music and food, as well as values and beliefs cultivated as
mothers, obreras, immigrants, activists, and heads of household with
scare material means. These commonalities reinforce their shared sense
of legitimacy and empower them to insist on a more radicallyconceived, democratic culture inclusive of working and poor women,
Chicanas and Mexicanas.
While celebrating their achievements, we must acknowledge they are
partial and incomplete. Only a fraction of those who lost their jobs
could “walk across” El Puente. Many more displaced workers fell off
the NAFTA bridge into permanent unemployment, deep poverty,
despair, and even suicide. Nevertheless, the accomplishments of
dislocated workers at La Mujer Obrera are immense. They give us who
occupy borderlands ground for imagining and creating a more
expansive, more inclusive society from one steeped in marginalities.
This is the democratic imaginary.
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